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And the first I knew of the attack that night which would change my life for ever, was the scream.
WE MOVED SLOWLY through that white, sleeping world. Fur-clad like beasts. Trudging and sluggish, weak with hunger but relentless.
We were too many and too well-armed to prove a temptation to brigands. And we always maintained a rearguard,
We exiles. Vagabonds drifting into that place like feathers from a fox’s kill.
And people. So many people. Clinging to the place like mussels to a rock,
Tents and mud and fish. That would be my life for the foreseeable future. Tents, mud and fish.
And again she was singing, a livelier tune now, though her voice was even sweeter than I remembered, undulating like a finch in flight, melodious and bewitching.
‘Hello, Lancelot,’ she said. This golden-haired woman.
‘What can I do for you, son of Ban?’
Had known I was King Ban’s son.
‘if my wine has revived you, if my ale has lifted you from despair, wait till you taste the moules and you will see why we live here on the land’s edge!’
Up a grassy hill, down a sandy path. Splashing through a pool brimming with slick weed. Now uneven rock which looked pink in the moonlight, Pelleas never losing his footing.
I saw my uncle. The traitor. A man I had admired.
Cursed iron. Tainted by fraternal murder.
The Dark Isles. That’s what we in Benoic had called Britannia,
Britain. A place at the edge of the world, so said the Romans.
A light rain hung like mist in the air and the day was as grey as the sea which surged landward in furrows of shattering foam and spray.
There it was again. A ship. A ship storm-driven onto the rocks and foundering, its oaken belly ripped open. Its ravenous hull drinking the sea.
‘That mad-eyed bastard is a druid, lad,’ Benesek said, ‘one of the last who can still speak with the gods. His name is Merlin.’
Guinevere. That night, standing there in the company of warriors, merchants, the Lady herself and the most famous druid in Britain, I realized that I was in love with Guinevere. I was not yet eleven years old.
Guinevere played the Lament of Adaryn, a tune we all knew, though it seemed, judging by the scarred and bearded faces around me, that the story never got any less sad the more men heard it.
But what angered me most was Merlin. The druid’s eyes were in Guinevere like fish hooks. He stood in the shadowed alcove near a stout door beyond which stone steps led up to the Lady’s chamber, so that in his black clothes one might not have known he was there. But I knew and so did the Lady, who was watching him watching Guinevere.
‘Hello, boy,’ said Merlin. It was a most striking face. Fierce. Intelligent. Cruel.
There were only a handful of druids left in all of Britain and Ireland, though there had once been many. Long ago, the druids kept the secrets of the Dark Isles. They communed with the gods, interpreted dreams, read the future and advised kings.
Guinevere shivered and her teeth worried at her bottom lip. Even with her face painted she looked no more than her eleven summers then, and the anger which had seethed in me earlier, at the way Uther’s men looked at Guinevere as she had played the harp, welled in my chest again.
‘You’re gifted, Lancelot,’ he said after I had parried a dozen of his thrusts and strikes, not that he had been trying his best.
But wine and ale had ruined my father and I would not let it ruin me.
Her beauty was elemental. She was fire and she was ocean. She was air and she was earth, and you just had to be in the same room as her to sense that wild spirit and be enchanted by it.
The great king had fallen sick in the depths of the previous winter and had been coughing blood ever since.
he must have known that his victory against the Saxons at Verulamium would be his last.
Lord Constantine, named after his grandfather whose men had elected him Emperor of the Romans though he had never been to Rome, was the son of Ambrosius Aurelius, who had been High King of Britain for ten years before he was assassinated and Uther assumed the throne in his brother’s place.
So perfect was the illusion that even the Lord of Tintagel’s wife, Igraine, was fooled and, believing her husband had returned from hunting, she took Uther to her bed.
had just passed Lord Constantine, nephew of King Uther and son of Ambrosius,
saw Merlin shake his head at Lord Arthur, eyes wide as if pleading with Uther’s son to change course before it was too late.
Uther the Pendragon, High King of Britain and scourge of Saxons, was dead.
‘Show me a king who isn’t a tyrant,’
‘He was acknowledged as Augustus in the western Roman Empire but was opposed by the eastern Emperor,’ Merlin said.
So we six, who slept in those woods not knowing what the next day would bring, had listened to Merlin, who told Arthur how he could remake Britain. How he could do as Maximus had done and unite the kingdoms under one warrior king, as Uther had tried but ultimately failed to do. And that warrior king would be Arthur. Arthur would wield the ancient talisman as another warlord had done not so very long ago, and we warriors of Britain would free ourselves of the Saxons and throw them back into the sea.
Arthur, perhaps wanting to believe more than actually believing, was prepared to at least try, for he must do something to prove that he was the Pendragon’s rightful heir and Britain’s best hope.
And so we rode the length of Britain looking for a sword. We rode in search of Excalibur.
‘The time to prepare for war is when there is peace,’
was an evocative image, made even more poignant for High King Uther having been the Pendragon of Britain, the warrior who had made it his life’s work to stem the Saxon tide.
It was a summer of blood, and by the time the first cold dewy mornings came, and the days turned still and heavy with the air smelling of damp earth, we had killed and maimed, mutilated and butchered more Saxons than we knew
And I am death.
